The first "point release" of the AROS distribution VmwAROS has been published, and it's available on its website. This version introduces a lot of changes and many new features that make it visually different from regular AROS build. Ken Lester's double state icons, for instance, make VmwAROS look more Amiga-like, and former Amiga users can also continue using their applications thanks to AmiBridge, a poweful scripting system which allows launching AmigaOS programs straight from AROS. A big effort has been made to enhance VmwAROS useability and user-friendlyness.

Actually, AROS is exactly the same kind of project as Haiku: an open source re-creation of Amiga OS, the same way Haiku recreates BeOS. The only real difference is that since AROS targets x86 and PPC, platforms which "classic" AmigaOS never ran on, binary compatability isn't an issue with AROS the way it is with Haiku, since there aren't really any binaries to be compatable with (at least unless you want to introduce a complicated emulation layer)

Vis a vis useful features of AROS compared to Haiku, the main one is probably source-level with AmigaOS 3.x. It's not 100%, but it is close enough that simple apps will compile on both and more complex thing often need only some code cleanup to rewrite bits of code that only work on M68K CPUs or that use odd compiler-specific constructs from various obscure Amiga C packages.